Whose consensus on rights?

MICHAEL BRANNIGAN

Published 7:49 pm, Thursday, March 1, 2012

The serious study of ethics, theoretical and applied, is often a minefield, particularly in the complex terrain of human rights. Not a day passes without news of rights abuses and frictions. We read about raging rioters in Greece protesting workers' rights violations, Syrian forces' bloody repressions of expressions of political pluralism, tension between state and religion accommodating matters of sexual morality, and struggles to raise New York's pathetic $7.25 an hour minimum wage.

However, appealing to human rights as a moral guidepost is not so straightforward. One major reason lies in a prevailing assumption that human rights as all-inclusive are derived from some official, universal consensus. Even reputable scholars presume this.

At last month's University of Tokyo's Global Alliance in Bioethics conference, I challenged colleagues from Oxford who alluded to a "pre-existing consensus" on universal human rights.

Who reached this consensus?

On what grounds? And how?

When we track the rocky history behind the December 1948 ratification of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these questions become especially urgent.

As a start, bear in mind that less powerful nations like the Philippines, India, New Zealand, and Latin American at first opposed the very idea of a "United Nations," fearing that powerful states would usurp their cherished sovereignty.

It is precisely this tension that led to the U.N.'s judicious 1976 formation of two distinct human rights covenants — The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Nonetheless, intense debate surrounding the tension between individual and collective human rights continues.

How can we protect universal human rights and dignity while simultaneously protecting member countries' domestic jurisdiction?

This tension is all the more exacerbated when we again ask: who reached this consensus, on what grounds, and how?

This spurs us on to consider the authority, or rather hegemony, of more privileged powers. University of Denver human rights scholar Micheline Ishay sharply captures this when she maintains that the U.N.'s "very structure, including its human rights mechanisms, excludes attention to the human rights violations of the major powers, which remain in critical instances protected by the veto privilege of the Security Council."

Who are these "major powers," and to what degree are they custodians of human rights?

Here is a recent example. In 1990, the U.S. launched the Human Genome Project to lead an international effort to map our complete genetic makeup. Critics argued that most of the research was conducted on people of European descent, 15 percent of the world population, disregarding the rest of the world.

These critics then established the Human Genome Diversity Project, using blood samples from various indigenous groups. Yet even this spawned opposition as detractors labeled the HGDP the "vampire project," a marketing strategy to exploit indigenous groups for the benefit and profit of another privileged power — biotech companies.

In this human rights minefield — a perilous entanglement of political, corporate, cultural and consumer interests — how do we navigate these shifting power topographies?

All of this compels us to inquire as to morally compelling grounds for asserting human rights. While I firmly believe that universal human rights indeed exist and must be safeguarded, this appeal must rest on grounds other than that of some alleged universal consensus.